Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Elon Musk Sells Lots Of Tesla Shares
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2022 I’m not interested in all the discourse around Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Twitter. It’s exhausting and it’s not my beat. I highly recommend you read The Verge if that’s your jam. They’re doing a good job. Musk either is a super brain genius and it’s all going to work out for him, or he’s been winging it all along and it’ll collapse around him. Or maybe not. There’a great line from The Coup’s “Repo Man” that goes: Banks that give the loan figure – damn, in the worst case We makin money cause we had it in the first place! And where was it that they got that cash from? You when you deposit it from bustin yo’ ass That’s all to say: If you’re the richest man in the world and you lose money, you still might be the second richest man in the world and your ability to make money is directly proportional to how much you have. Plus, there’s always money somewhere in Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the banana stand or whatever. The tweet above is from April and it’s Elon Musk, as I read it, implying there were no plans to sell more Tesla shares to support Twitter (We already shared a report that Musk was considering getting new loans for Twitter using Tesla as collateral). According to CNBC and SEC filings, Elon Musk sold some more shares yesterday worth about $3.6 billion. This is, if I’m counting correctly, the third time this year he’s sold shares since saying he wasn’t planning to do so. I like this quote from the CNBC article: Plans change! It could be a tougher market for Tesla going forward as competition from Chinese firms in China and everyone else in Europe and the United States gets a lot stronger. Director of research for VerityData, Ben Silverman, wrote in an e-mail to CNBC on Wednesday, “Musk’s prior sales going back to November 2021 were expertly timed, so Tesla shareholders need to pay attention to Musk’s actions and not his words – or lack thereof when it comes to his recent selling.” Markets are not fully transparent or logical/rational and perhaps that data is just being priced in, but Twitter has dropped from about $292 when the Tweet above was posted to… $156 yesterday. That’s not quite a 50% drop.
Peugeot Is Dropping The INCEPTION At CES
Don’t name a car inception. That’s a silly name. Before the movie, you can call a car INCEPTION in all caps and people will think it’s clever. Now people will just think about the movie. You try telling that to the French! Peugeot is now part of Stellantis and so it makes a bit of sense that they should debut its new concept at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas next year. Here’s all the company is saying about it: Do I hope this means that Peugeot will start selling cars in the United States? Absolutely. Will this happen? I’m guessing no. Stellantis needs another brand in the US like David needs another rusty ass Jeep. I feel like every Fiat dealership I see is 18 used non-Fiats and one 500X that never sold. Also, don’t name a car INCEPTION:
GM Recalls 825,000 Vehicles For Super Bright Lights
Brains are weird. If there are 15 people in your town of 300,000 people who have mullets and you happen to randomly see all of those people in the same day you’d assume the hairstyle had made a huge comeback. If you saw one of these people every three weeks you’d just assume you saw some people with mullets. I bring this up because a couple of times I feel like I’ve seen Tahoes or Suburbans where it seemed like all the lights were on in front and it was super annoying (I live in New York and they’re extremely common). It didn’t happen enough for my brain to catalog it as anything other than random. Then I saw the news today from the AP via The Detroit News: “GM recalls over 825k vehicles to fix daytime running lights.” My brain feels like it had an itch for three months and the Associated Press just dragged its pointy nails along my cerebellum. Such a satisfying feeling. The recall covers certain 2022 and 2023 Cadillac Escalade, Chevrolet Silverado 1500, Chevrolet Suburban and Tahoe, GMC Sierra 1500 and GMC Yukon SUVs. Also included are Cadillac CT4s and CT5s from the 2020 to 2023 model years, as well as Buick Envisions from 2021 to 2023.
VinFast Opens Four More Stores In California
VinFast, the Vietnamese car company hoping to sell electric cars in the United States, has just opened four more stores in Southern California as part of their curious push into the market. Here’s what the company’s CEO Giang Nguyen had to say: We had a chance to poke around some of their future cars at the Los Angeles Auto Show and thought they looked as though they could be competitive if priced right. We haven’t driven them, but our buddy Kevin Williams did for Jalopnik and it doesn’t sound like their vehicles were ready for prime time:
The Flush
Should Peugeot come back to the United States? If it did, what would be the product mix?
The Volvo XC40 and Escape are the only two SUVs that did well on new IIHS test The men who helped Carlos Ghosn escape had a far worse fate The 2023 Subaru WRX Miraculously Only Costs $31,625 The World’s Biggest Shipping Company Wants To Ban Gas-Powered Trucks Used car prices keep falling as inflation finally cools
Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage. Photos: Peugeot, Tesla, Adult Swim, GM, Vinfast An updated 505 (EV/Hybrid) would be awesome. I just don’t need the typical Peugeot driver, we don’t need to import dumb people we are doing that quite well. VinFast interests me. Would want to see the bugs ironed out and if the battery subscription pans out. The price is in line with other EVs. I hope this isn’t good money spent unwisely. Unless they can get quality up, and sell at a reasonable price, it doesn’t sound as if US sales will follow. And regarding the GM headlight issue… This is minor compared to the bigger issue of many of the latest CUVs and SUVs with high mounted superbright headlights that cause a lot of glare. And while we are at it, another change needs to be made with the latest vehicles where the dashboard lights are stupidly on even when the exterior lights are off which causes more driver than in the past to drive at night thinking their full lights are on when they’re not. If the dash lights are on, then the front and rear lights should be on as well. …is that good? do I want that? Was driving to meet a couple friends on Saturday night and had a Tahoe behind me at a light after dark. The headlights were bouncing off my side mirrors and straight into my eyes. Felt like it took about 30 min to recover from they were so bright. Kinda glad to hear its a correctable issue and not just thats what headlights are now, deal with it in your low sedan. On a more personal note, it seems the idiotic trend of driving around at night with fog lights always ON that I’ve started noticing a few years back is now firmly entrenched, as the vast majority of cars I now encounter on the road are being driven by one of these morons (the rest of them are driving with only the DRLs on at night, with zero lighting in the back).
